Trying to grasp the interplay between the US homeless crisis and the capital housing market can be a tad tricky at times. So often homelessness is viewed as the fallout of addiction or bad life choices, or the after affect of incarceration.

After the housing market crash which saw hundreds of thousands of Americans lose their homes, a large number of which were illegal foreclosures, we saw suddenly this overlap between the speculated value of a house and the often violent eviction of law-abiding home owners.

Not much happened in retaliation at first. Not until a couple years later when Occupy Wall Street ramped up did a true mass movement against criminal banks and reckless landlords finally connect in the public’s mind our perverse induced scarcity of resources where in fact none actually exists.

Those people you see sleeping on benches would be housed in a just and equitable society, and we wouldn’t have to build a damn thing.

Streetwise is a 1984 documentary film by director Martin Bell. It followed in the wake of a July 1983 Life magazine article, “Streets of the Lost”, by writer Cheryl McCall and photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Bell’s wife.

Well, the nightmare we knew was coming is finally here. Donald Trump is in charge of America. In a matter of hours he proved just how belligerent his administration will be towards workers, women, scientists, and immigrants alike.

Yes this nightmare is now reality, and no amount of drinking will change that. I know, I tried.

Some have wondered how establishment Dems could possibly go along with this. Isn’t it obvious? They were never afraid of Trump getting elected, just like they aren’t afraid to confirm Trump’s cabinet picks. They pose no threat to their Wallstreet backers, no threat to the status quo of capital. They were afraid of Bernie, he was the one they had to stop.

On Martin Luther King Day it was reported an infant, possibly only hours old, had died in a homeless camp near a bus stop in downtown Portland, Oregon. First responders rushed the baby to OHSU, but it was too late. Reports were inconclusive as to whether the child was in fact stillborn, or died shortly after in what has become one of the most severe winters in what’s normally a very mild boreal climate.

This is certainly a tragic confluence of lack of mental health and homeless services, as well as an immediate incapability to shelter Portland’s thousands of homeless people when temperatures take a sudden plunge.

In a week this total fraud of an election will be over, and among the great number of things they have in common, one of the two disaster candidates elected will be in full support of the Dakota Access Pipeline. We could have had Bernie Sanders. We could have had Jill Stein. But nope. The fossil fuel industry owns both the Democrat and Republican parties.

What’s so impressive is how many so-called progressives have convinced themselves that their center-Right neoliberal candidate shares their values and morality. Hillary supporters say Jill Stein is crazy, yet their reasons for supporting Hillary are all issues that Stein actually supports and Hillary actually doesn’t support. Are they just selectively sexist or what?

So once again we get conned into a rigged oligarchy that caters the illusion of choice, and once again the real work, the real Hope and Change rests on the front line communities; the rebels chaining themselves to bulldozers, building barricades, getting beaten by police and bitten by attack dogs.

There’s a perception that the housing crash of 2008 halted suburban sprawl. In some places, it did just that. But we’re almost ten years past that epoch, and the home builders associations have been lobbying like they always do for more construction in placeless environs where silly things like public transit or public squares remain unthinkable.

Still too are marketing shills paid to intertwine the idea of upward mobility with urban flight as somehow still being a positive thing. Take this cringe-worthy quote from Ford Motor Company chief sales analyst Erich Merkle on CNN: “[Millennials] might be able to hold off for a period of time, but at some point they will have families, move to the suburbs, and they are going to purchase many, many new cars.”

Bernie and Hillary may be at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they do have one thing in common: they both want you to take Donald Trump very seriously. As do a lot of voters claiming they’re terrified of Mr. Solid Gold Dumpster Fire. Hillary’s only chance requires distracting us from her record by reinforcing just how terrified we should be. She’s even conned Bernie into fearing The Orange One.

But we’ve heard this same refrain every SINGLE election. We get served regressive neoliberalism on a platter. We’re told this is as good as it’s going to get, lest we waste our vote on some Third Party out of absurdities like principle or conscience.

It’s gotten damn disturbing lately, though. Hillary Inc. is scared of losing the presidency a second time. And now they’ve got Wikileaks and an army of hackers exposing their corruption.

So what’s their strategy to counter her growing unpopularity with independent voters? Copy Bush, of course. They’ve adopted his whole “You’re either with us or against us!” bullying tactic to mask how shitty their candidate truly is.

A true public space is overtly political in that it is a democratized space. That is, there is no regular programming which dictates the goings on within such a space. Instead, the day to day happenings are largely decided by those who use the place. City government or other municipalities can manage or maintain public space, but cannot impose additional restrictive rules or regulations if the park or plaza is to remain truly democratic.

To enjoy such a space involves trusting strangers, and in all relationships of trust, there is risk. In the midst of food carts and outdoor chess there is also crime, and even the rare act of terrorism.

As the Project for Public Space has written in the past: “With mounting public anxiety, and the fact that the distinction between public and private space is becoming increasingly blurred, there is greater likelihood that places will be more intensely monitored, surveyed, even militarized, in order to evoke a sense of safety.”

Thousands of Detroiters have had their tap water cut by the city for late bills in what the United Nations considers a humanitarian crime. At the same time as water won’t flow from the tap, hundreds – if not thousands – of the city’s fire hydrants no longer function.

Arsonists know this. They also know barely any of the of fires set each year get investigated. How many fires are we talking here? Motor City Muckraker recently tallied the total.

10,000 fires in just three years. That’s how fast Detroit is burning. Like so many stories of collapse in Michigan, you have to ask: how the fuck did it get this bad?

Since the riots in the early 1940’s and late 1960’s, fire has been a common tool of the discontented, the outraged, the hopeless, and the pyromaniacs of Detroit. Devil’s Night (on the eve of Halloween each year) became a legendary evening of arson for the city, with one single night in the 80’s claiming hundreds of buildings.

Today, 4th of July has replaced Devil’s Night as the new date of mass conflagration. Last summer on July 4th the Detroit Fire Department responded to over sixty calls in 24 hours.

It took over a year for Portland’s Citizen Review Commission to issue a ruling regarding the police action of November 29, 2014. In January of this year, the panel came to a 5-3 decision stating that orders issued by the Portland Police Bureau to hundreds of Black Lives Matter protesters were in fact unlawful.

CRC’s investigation was the result of some 40 complaints filed with the city auditor’s office the Monday morning following a weekend of unrest in the wake of a grand jury decision to not indict Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson earlier that summer.

The Oregonian reported on the night of Nov 29, 2014 hours after a rally attended by Rev. Jesse Jackson, over a hundred protesters were kettled by police and told they were under arrest. The entire crowd was held for almost an hour along with members of the media, while just 10 protesters were taken into custody for booking on disorderly conduct charges.

During the CRC’s hearing, one member asked how the 10 were chosen to be placed in custody. “That I can’t speak to, how the 10 were chosen,” Capt. Bryan Parman of the PPB replied.

Urbanists are always complaining presidents and other federal officials don’t focus enough on urban issues. They’re right to. National politics is framed around the Heartland of America, not dense urban centers where most of us actually live.

That could soon change. Bernie Sanders is currently waging an insurgent campaign for president inside the other corporate militaristic party, much to the shock of the Democratic establishment. And I was wrong. Other writers were too. We predicted Sanders would be a sheepdog who’d herd the Left to the doorstep of Hillary’s Starkiller Base, drop out, and promptly endorse her.

And Sanders accomplished this by having two things Hillary can’t buy: authenticity and likability.

The other rare qualification Sanders has is being a former mayor. The only president in US history to ever have that in their resume was man-walrus Grover Cleveland.

Why does this matter? Because as a mayor, you’re far more engaged (hopefully) with the complexities of human nature and need, and likely less partisan or ideological. Liberal and conservative might be opposites in rural Ohio, but in cities such labels become meaningless. This might be why his proposed climate action plan includes increasing funding for transportation by a staggering 250%.

When you realize the guy feeding pigeons in his sandals might become president of America.